dynamic of destruction culture and mass killing in the first world war making of the modern world

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On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now 'legitimate' targets. Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at the enemy's civilian population.

On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now 'legitimate' targets. Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at the enemy's civilian population.

On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now 'legitimate' targets.Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at the enemy's civilian population.

Offering exhaustive coverage, detailed analyses, and the latest historical interpretations of events, this expansive, five-volume encyclopedia is the most comprehensive and detailed reference source on the First World War available today. • Provides comprehensive coverage of the causes of the war that allows readers to fully understand the complex origins of such a monumental conflict • Supplies detailed analyses and explanations of the events before, during, and after World War I, such as how the results of the war set the stage for the global Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as detailed biographical data on key military and civilian individuals during World War I • Includes a chronologically organized document volume that enables students to examine the sources of historical information firsthand • Covers all key battles, land and sea, and their impacts, as well as the critical technological developments that affected the war's outcomes

Challenging assumptions about the separation of high politics and everyday life, Belinda Davis uncovers the important influence of the broad civilian populace--particularly poorer women--on German domestic and even military policy during World War I. As Britain's wartime blockade of goods to Central Europe increasingly squeezed the German food supply, public protests led by "women of little means" broke out in the streets of Berlin and other German cities. These "street scenes" riveted public attention and drew urban populations together across class lines to make formidable, apparently unified demands on the German state. Imperial authorities responded in unprecedented fashion in the interests of beleaguered consumers, interceding actively in food distribution and production. But officials' actions were far more effective in legitimating popular demands than in defending the state's right to rule. In the end, says Davis, this dynamic fundamentally reformulated relations between state and society and contributed to the state's downfall in 1918. Shedding new light on the Wilhelmine government, German subjects' role as political actors, and the influence of the war on the home front on the Weimar state and society, Home Fires Burning helps rewrite the political history of World War I Germany.

This book provides an accessible and up–to–date account of the rich military history of the nineteenth century. It takes a fresh approach, making novel links with conflict and coercion, and moving away from teleological emphases. Naval developments and warfare are included, as are social and cultural dimensions of military activity. Leading military historian Jeremy Black offers the reader a twenty–first century approach to this period, particularly through his focus on the dynamic drive provided by different forms of military goals, or "tasking". This allows echoes with modern warfare to come to the fore and provides a fuller understanding of a period sometimes considered solely as background to the total war of 1914–45. Alongside state–to–state warfare and the move toward "total war", Black′s emphasis on different military goals gives due weight to trans–oceanic conflict at the expense of non–Europeans. Irregular, internal and asymmetric war are all considered, ranging from local insurgencies to imperial expeditions, and provide a deliberate shift from Western–centricity. At the very cutting edge of its field, this book is a must read for all students and scholars of military history and its related disciplines.

War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an 'anatomy of an occupation', charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war. New categories for viewing the East took root along with the idea of a German cultural mission in these supposed wastelands. After Germany's defeat, the Eastern front's 'lessons' were taken up by the Nazis, radicalized, and enacted when German armies returned to the East in World War II. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.

The essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of distinguished scholars, combine to explore the way in which fascism is understood by contemporary scholarship, as well as pointing to areas of continuing dispute and discussion. From a focus on Italy as, chronologically at least, the 'first Fascist nation', the contributors cover a wide range of countries, from Nazi Germany and the comparison with Soviet Communism to fascism in Yugoslavia and its successor states. The book also examines the roots of fascism before 1914 and its survival, whether in practice or in memory, after 1945. The analysis looks at both fascist ideas and practice, and at the often uneasy relationship between the two. The book is not designed to provide any final answers to the fascist problem and no quick definition emerges from its pages. Readers will rather find there historical debate. On appropriate occasions, the authors disagree with each other and have not been forced into any artificial 'consensus', offering readers the chance to engage with the debates over a phenomenon that, more than any other single factor, led humankind into the catastrophe of the Second World War.

This thematic history of the world from 1780 to the onset of the First World War reveals that the world was far more ‘globalised’ at this time than is commonly thought. Explores previously neglected sets of connections in world history. Reveals that the world was far more ‘globalised’, even at the beginning of this period, than is commonly thought. Sketches the ‘ripple effects’ of world crises such as the European revolutions and the American Civil War. Shows how events in Asia, Africa and South America impacted on the world as a whole. Considers the great themes of the nineteenth-century world, including the rise of the modern state, industrialisation and liberalism. Challenges and complements the regional and national approaches which have traditionally dominated history teaching and writing.

This concise overview of the German 'Economic Miracle' of the post-World War Two reconstruction years argues that the German ecoonomy was in a far healthier position at the end of the war than previously thought, and that the preconditions for growth - a skilled and abundant labour supply and a favourable international political climate - facilitated the phenomenal 'recovery' and economic growth that was to follow.